Old-Fashioned Values (11 page)

Her blush only increasing, she obeyed, and that was the first time she saw the little smile. The little smile said, “I know what you need, and I can give it to you.”
Oh, God,
Rachel thought,
I’m getting wet just at this man’s smile. It’s not supposed to happen like this in real life, is it?

For a long, long moment, John simply held her eyes locked in his own gaze. When the waiter had receded, he spoke at last.

“It’s a lovely little story, Rachel,” he said. “Thank you for writing it.”

Rachel sucked her lips in, and felt her face pucker, at the strength of the shame and gratitude that somehow mingled together inside her heart.
What will he do now?
her whole being seemed to shout. Something in the way he had said “Thank you for writing it” seemed to say that he wasn’t planning to take her into the lavatory and spank her, the way one fantasy version of this scene went in her mind, or bring her to his car for a spanking after lunch.

“You’re welcome,” she whispered.

“Let’s not spoil the cassoulet with conversation right now,” he continued, “but while you eat I’d like you to consider what the story that you wrote for me means to you. To put it more straightforwardly, if I were to start to play with you, and if I were to tell you that I plan to spank you tonight, would you walk away?”

“I—”

John held up his finger. “Eat first,” he said.

She barely could, because her tummy was fluttering so violently, but she managed it, in the end, because she’d never had cassoulet before, and it was so very good.

During the cassoulet, he made small talk about his own upbringing in Maine, and drew her out a little about her family and her interests outside of school. It felt like a normal date, for ten minutes or so—just a date with a man who knew how to keep a conversation going, and let you know that he was interested, and interesting.

“Alright,” he finally said, when his own cassoulet was nearly gone, and Rachel had stopped eating. “Time to answer my question. I want to put it a slightly different way now, though: I’d like to take you to dinner.”

Rachel’s heart had sped up quite extremely. She had opened her mouth to say, “Yes, I’d like that,” when John continued, “But for a first dinner, I have to take you somewhere fancy. Do you have a nice dress?”

“Yes, I’d like that,” turned into “Kind of?”

John looked at her with the little smile that Rachel had already decided was the kind of thing you never saw coming—the kind of thing that told you that even though he was forty and you were eighteen, the world’s frowns meant nothing.

“‘Kind of’ will do for tonight, young lady,” John said. “Be at Hascom Gate at six, in your ‘kind of’ nice dress, alright?”

“Alright,” Rachel said. Playing—they must already be playing, the way he had said they would, if she thought she wanted to.

Then John said, “You didn’t walk away, Rachel. I just want to be sure that you know that I do plan to spank you tonight.”

Rachel made a little sound in her throat, as she tried to say “Yes,” but she had to content herself with nodding.

“Alright,” John said. “No dessert, I think, because we’ll have a very lovely dinner tonight.”

“Really?” Rachel asked, slightly flabbergasted. Two incredible meals on the same day? “Where are you taking me?”

“Wait and see. It’ll be a bit of a drive, but I promise to have you back to your dorm by one, if that’s alright.”

Rachel nodded quickly, and then John turned the topic of conversation to Rachel’s experience with fine dining, which was basically nil. When they parted outside the café, he gave her a quick hug and looked into her eyes.

“Do you know about safewords?”

Rachel blushed and nodded.

“Green, yellow, red?”

Rachel nodded again. “I’ve, um, read about that kind of thing.”

“I thought you might have,” he said, with the little smile. “See you at six.”

So now, at 5:55, Rachel waited at the big gate, and watched a limo pull in—probably for the president of the college or somebody. The limo stopped, and John got out.

Rachel felt her eyes go wide. “You’re kidding,” she said, as he came around to open the door for her. “Where are we going?”

“Wait and see, Rachel,” John replied. “I should warn you that excessive curiosity is something I won’t hesitate to spank you for.”

“What?”

“Get in the car, please.”

Playing. He was playing, and Rachel’s knees were weak, because it wasn’t just play. Rachel was his toy, and that meant that by playing he demonstrated to her how badly she needed him to dominate her, take her in hand, teach her the lessons she suddenly felt only he could teach. She slid into the enormous back seat of the limo, and John closed the door.

Her dress was fit for college interviews, really, not for limos—demure blue polyester over white stockings. And… pink panties. And a matching pink bra that Rachel suddenly wondered if John would see tonight. As she waited for him to get in, on the other side of the limo, she folded her hands in her lap and just looked at them.

The door opened, and she felt him slide in next to her, but she still couldn’t look.

“Safewords, remember?” she heard him say softly.

Rachel nodded and dared a glance over at him. He sat, dressed in a dark suit and a red tie, in a relaxed posture on the other side of the bench seat. What was going to happen? A thousand hot, shameful—even violent—possibilities went through Rachel’s mind, ranging from “Kneel on the floor and take out my cock, and suck it,” to “Take your clothes off, slut,” but John said, to her surprise, “What do you want to do after college, Rachel?”

Rachel’s mouth fell open slightly.

John continued helpfully, “I know you don’t have a really ready answer to that yet, but one thing I want to help you understand is that even as a freshman you should have a way of talking about it intelligently.”

“Um.” Rachel felt her brow furrow. “Well, I guess I think I’m a pretty good writer…”

John smiled—a smile that Rachel knew instantly meant he approved.

“That’s a very good way to start—practically the best. Tell the person who just asked that awkward question what you’re good at. But don’t hesitate. Don’t guess. Try again.”

That was when Rachel realized how dangerous this situation might really be. She had been worried that there might be some danger of sexual violence, and she had set up check-ins with Sally (who, Rachel knew, had some kind of very big night ahead of her that Sally blushed over, and finally refused to disclose the nature of, though Rachel had her strong suspicions). It suddenly appeared to her, though, that the real danger was that she might come to see things John Gammon’s way so thoroughly that everything else in her life would fall by the wayside.

At the same time, though, she realized that if anyone were to guide her—to take her in hand—she wanted it to be a man like John Gammon, though the only man she’d ever met like John Gammon was John Gammon.

“I’m a very good writer,” she said.

“Yes,” John said, “you are. What do you want to do with your skill at the written word?”

Svengali. Was that the name of the guy who controlled… who the hell was it? Or was Svengali just a hypnotist?
“I… I want to explain things.”

“Good. But vague. Enough on that line for now, though.”

“John?” Suddenly Rachel felt confusion rise up and begin to erode the magic of this moment—buoying her up out of the sea of attraction into which she had started to fall.

“Sir,” John said, looking into her eyes.

Rachel’s heart thudded wildly at the word.

“Sir,” John repeated calmly.

“Sir?” Rachel whispered. “Are we playing now?”

“Yes,” John said. “We’re playing the game of life.” His mouth crooked into an ironic smile. Not the little smile, but another wonderful version of it.

Rachel giggled. “Like the one with the plastic cars and the little people?”

“Young lady, aren’t you too young to remember that?”

“My dad used to play it with me. I thought it was so fun.” She blushed. “Especially the part about having babies,” she admitted. “I mean, I didn’t really want to have a baby, but I wanted to know how a girl got a husband who made her have a baby.”

John laughed. “Well, maybe we are kind of playing that—your version anyway. But I certainly don’t mean that game. I mean that if you and I share some part of our lives, even if I’m only ever the mentor who holds you to account with an occasional spanking, I’ll hope to get you to see that the only way to live in the real world is to see that everybody in the real world is playing his or her own game. It’s just that when I play loving discipline with a girl, we add some extra rules.”

Chapter Thirteen

Mark had reserved the second nicest room in the Mendon Inn. Apprehensively, while Sally waited discreetly in the lobby, he checked in, expecting to have to brave disapproving looks from the clerk, but either so many Mendon students stayed here that Mark’s presence was unremarkable, or Mark managed to look as old and blasé as he tried to look—about twenty-eight, in town for a conference; no disapproving looks came his way, as far as he could tell, while the clerk told ‘Mr. Weaver’ that the room was on the third floor, at the end of the hall.

Mark had planned to take Sally to a very nice dinner in the hotel dining room—generally called the nicest restaurant in Mendon—but when the door of the room was shut behind them, Sally, wearing a lovely go-out-to-dinner green dress that had the paradoxical effect of making Mark want to rip it off her, looked at him shyly and said, “I’m not sure I’m hungry.”

Mark cancelled the dinner reservation. “Maybe we’ll have room service later,” he said.

“After,” Sally whispered. She had turned on only one lamp, and so the room was a mix of light and shadow. Out the window, just across the street, their fellow Mendon students passed in and out of Hascom Gate. Mark and Sally stood, looking at one another. Mark had known exactly what he wanted to do when the time came, but now he couldn’t seem to remember, and he simply stepped forward and took Sally in his arms.

He didn’t kiss her yet. Something in the way she had looked at him when she said ‘after’ seemed to tell him that she was frightened, and he felt above everything else the need to comfort her.

“Nervous?” he asked,

She nodded against his shoulder. Her phone went off. “I think it’s Rachel,” she murmured. Then, “Sir, may I look? She’s out with John tonight and we set up times to text.”

Mark could hardly believe how wonderful it made him feel to have Sally call him ‘sir,’ there in the hotel room, where they would soon pass through the barrier that seemed to Mark to represent the passage to true adulthood. It made him feel that all the worry he had had since he understood that his dominant eroticism couldn’t be satisfied by conventional romantic relationships was, at least here and now, behind him.

“With John? Of course.” He released her from his arms, and she went to sit on the huge four-poster bed and take out her phone.

“Wow. He picked her up in a limo, and she doesn’t know where they’re going.”

“Is she worried?” Mark asked.

“That’s what I’m asking,” Sally said, her fingers flying over her phone’s keyboard. Then she said, “No, but she says that if she doesn’t text in an hour I should call the police. I’m pretty sure she’s joking.”

“You’re not worried about her, are you? I mean, you met John.”

“Not at all. I do worry that if Cassandra finds out there’ll be hell to pay, because of that threat to call my parents. I think she probably would call Rachel’s parents if she found out that Rachel was dating John—or maybe only if she found out why, or, I don’t know, how.” She looked up at him, and now he couldn’t help bending down to kiss her very softly.

“‘That thing we do,’ some people call it,” Mark said.

“What?”

“It’s so hard to explain, they say, and you either get it or you don’t.”

“But what do they mean?”

Mark sat down on the bed and put his arms around his wonderful girlfriend, breathing the floral scent of her shampoo in as deeply as he could. She snuggled her cheek into his chest, still covered with the blue blazer he had put on over grey flannels, for the nice dinner they had planned.

“Spanking, mostly,” he said. “Spanking as… well, as a way of life, even. You know what I mean, right?”

He looked down into her eyes, and she compressed her lips into a tight line. For a terrible moment, he wondered whether he had been wrong that Sally’s erotic spirit was wired as the perfect complement to his.

Then that moment became marvelous and transformative. Sally said, in a voice so soft he could barely hear it, “Do I ever.”

Suddenly Mark’s script came back to him—hovered in front of his eyes. “Sally,” he said. “It’s time.”

Her eyes widened, but she said nothing. He kissed her and then he said, “Stand up and take off your dress.”

Sally’s breathing became very audible: her mouth hung open a little and she almost panted, and Mark found the sound so arousing that he had to shift his position a little because of the discomfort that came from his instantly hard cock.

“Did you hear me, Sally?” he asked very softly, knowing somehow that that was exactly the right thing to say.

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“Are you going to do as I said?”

“I… I want to… oh, God, Mark. Yellow.”

“What?”

“Like, a safeword? Yellow?”

Something stirred in Mark’s memory. John had talked about safewords. He had no real experience of kink then, at the age of twenty-one, but he felt proud forever after of the way he figured out, on the fly, exactly what Sally meant.

“Okay,” he said. “So, what happens now?”

“Well, I’m not sure,” Sally said. “Rachel read all this stuff about kink—I think she asked Cassandra, and Cassandra gave her, like, a million links. So we were talking this morning before her lunch with John, and then in the afternoon when she was getting ready for dinner—”

“Wait. She had lunch with John, too?”

Sally nodded. “It went really well, and, um, he’s going to spank her tonight.”